[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac Python and eggs...

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Tue Jan 24 20:20:31 CET 2006


On Jan 24, 2006, at 11:08 AM, Christopher Barker wrote:

> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> You REALLY should read the docs.
>
> Of course I should, and I did. I also did my floundering until I
> identified the problem before asking for help here. My comment here  
> was
> bringing up the question of how, on OS-X, we want to recommend people
> deal with having installed scripts on their $PATH.
>
> However, this whole discussion started because I thought we wanted to
> have an easy way for newbies to find and install packages on OS-X.  
> This
> has not be easy for me so far, and I am neither an OS-X nor a *nix
> newbie. If it was just me, I'd just run the setup.py scripts that come
> with the packages and be done with it, but I want to help out the
> community, as well as having a standard approach to point my  
> colleagues to.

If you ran the setup.py script that came with the packages, the  
scripts would get installed to the same place.

>> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall
>
> The only thing it says there about installing the easy_install  
> script is:
>
> "An easy_install script will be installed in the normal location for
> Python scripts on your platform."

And it did.

> You've seen me on this list for years, and I have NEVER noticed
>
> /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin
>
> before. I have had scripts installed in /usr/local/bin. (probably from
> mpkgs put together by Bob)

That's why.

> So, the question is:
>
> What should "standard Practice" be for handling scripts installed by
> easy-install (and distutils, I suppose). I see a couple options so  
> far:
>
> * Advise people to put:
>
> /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin
>
> on their PATH.
>
> * Have people put symlinks to scripts in there in their PATH.
>
> * Follow Charlie's suggestion:
>
> Create a ~/.pydistutils.cfg file with:
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> [easy_install]
> script_dir = /usr/local/bin
> ---------------------------------------------

There's a fourth suggestion which installs to your homedir instead of  
globally.  That's documented in the EasyInstall documentation.  Very  
close to Charlie's suggestion:

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#mac-os-x-user- 
installation

[install]
install_lib = ~/Library/Python$py_version_short/site-packages
install_scripts = ~/bin


> By the way, I didn't see any mention of the script_dir value in the
> Easy_Install doc.

It's mentioned at least three times in the custom installations section.

> None of those options are particularly newbie-friendly.
>
> * Change the default script_dir in the "official unofficial" Framework
> builds to /usr/local/bin
>
> That's more newbie-friendly, but I'm sure has lots of other problems.

Yeah.  Either way, this is the fault of the framework Python, not  
setuptools.  It's just inheriting this behavior from distutils.

-bob



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